The subject of this paper is of interest to me for two reasons: one is the debate about followership, and the consequent set up of the follower as a straw man, at the receiving end of the blame game about the ills of the Nigerian society, an issue I found scholarly attractive. To confess, I have had a longing for an engagement with the subject. Two, you cannot go beyond governance to address followership without reference to the former. Indeed, the content of the literature on followership encompasses the debate about governance, and leadership. So, I shall address, first the question of governance, and then stretch the thread to followership in ways that underline their relationship. In all, I shall relate to four variables, namely, governance, leadership, followership, and participatory democracy.
After the cold war between the East and the West, governance attained significance in the argot of agencies of global governance in ways that problematises the simplistic use of that word as the equivalence of government. Gerry Stoker (1998) captures this traditional sense as well as indicates the deviation, in other words, the point of departure from the usual usage. According to him, “Anglo-American political theory uses the term ‘government’ to refer to the formal institutions of the state and their monopoly of legitimate coercive power. Government is characterized by its ability to make decisions and its capacity to enforce them. In particular government is understood to refer to the formal and institutional processes which operate at the level of the nation state to maintain public order and facilitate collective action. Theoretical work on governance reflects the interest of the social science community in a shifting pattern in styles of governing. The traditional use of ‘governance’ and its dictionary entry define it as a synonym for government. “
Following Rhodes and Rosenau, Stoker (1998, p. 17) notes that there is a redirection in the use and import of governance, signifying a change in the meaning of government to mean a new process of governing society along certain code of governance morality that are distinct from the traditional institutions of government. The point is that governance is no longer monolithic in terms of its meaning. Elsewhere, I have adverted to what I called the “other governance” which inheres in the politics of policy formulation by the international financial institutions (IFIs) meant for developing countries with implication for politics and economy (Akhaine, 2004, p. 6). Stoker (1998, p. 18) points up its variable, namely, “a commitment to efficient and accountable government”. So what we have is supra governance, or more precisely, global governance described by Caroline Thomas (2001, p. 168) as “The growing array of extra national, bilateral, regional and worldwide institutions and arrangement through which policy and politics are being developed above and between states. This creates frameworks that affect peoples and societies either directly or through shaping the activities of particular states.”
In line with globalisation, Stoker (1998, p. 21) further argues that governance denotes the blurring of boundaries between the states and other agencies outside the state in terms responsibility for solving socio-economic problems of society, that is, the shifting of responsibilities into the province where the key actors are in the private, voluntary and the citizens’ spheres.
In a research report titled Our Global Neighborhood issued in 1995, The Commission on Global Governance defines governance as the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and cooperative action maybe taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest.’’ It has four features: governance is not a set of rules or an activity, but a process; the process of governance is not based on control, but on coordination; it involves both public and private sectors; it is not a formal institution, but continuing interaction (Keeping, 2018, pp. 2-3).
Furthermore, governance embraces what is now called the new mangement that involves the deployment of panoply of tools that goes beyond direct provisions of service to contracting, franchising and deploying new forms of regulation aimed at achieving greater efficiency in the production of public services.
Notwithstanding the above insight into the dynamics of governance as a conceptual category, it is operationalised here as those processes that lead to the establishment of equilibrium in society, i. e, balancing of the interests of all the social forces in society in the dispensation of public good. This is the responsibility of government within the ambit of the state. So, we are back to the point of departure where governance assumed multifaceted meaning. Government is an element of the state, the latter being the approximation of the ‘general will’ from a Rousseauan viewpoint. If the “general will” as a composite entity belongs to the people whose will make up the state, popular sovereignty, therefore, resides in the people. Modern government should be democratic in the sense of majority rule. This translates into the people, while elected representatives become the interim wielder of sovereignty. We now turn to followership.
Followership has been defined in different ways. Its connotation comes as complimentary opposites because when it is defined, because it is only intelligible in the context of leadership discourse. Various scholars have adverted to this point. Brian Crossman & Joanna Crossman (2011, pp. 482-483) have noted its use as “the opposite of leadership in a leadership/followership continuum…In other words, definitions of followership are also often constructed in terms of how the concept relates to leadership. Julian Stern (2021, p. 58) who lends his voice to the relations of roles between leadership and followership, notes that “followership seems to me to be leadership’s forgotten companion, ignored, an embarrassment.
Followership is the f-word that we hate to use.” Tourish (cited in Stern, 2021, p. 60) sees “leadership and followership as co-constructed phenomena embedded in fluid social structures that we have barely begun to understand”. For stern (2021, p. 61), in theorising, “A leadership theory without a complementary followership theory is like the sound of one hand clapping: it has no impact at all”. Bayo Okunade (2008, p. 18) further foregrounds the relationship between leadership and followership in his inaugural lecture stressing that “…leadership must always identify and represent the aspirations of the people or the collectivity it is leading…It is these attributes that determine leadership acceptability, ability to gain compliance of followership and legitimacy.”
To be continued tomorrow
Prof. Akhaine delivered this paper at the 46th annual conference of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria, at the Muson Centre, Lagos, September, 15, 2022.
